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Chris is no longer running away from his problems thanks to homeless charity CHAT

After running away from home following an incident involving a rolling pin and a carving knife, Chris' incredible journey saw him meeting heroin addicts, alcoholics and other characters before settling down in Tiverton

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by Lewis Clarke

01:35, 21 Oct 2017Updated06:44, 21 Oct 2017

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Chris says painting is a form of therapy and has turned his Tiverton home into a small studio

Homeless, jobless, and with nothing left but the clothes he was wearing; thankfully, a lot has changed in a year for Chris Simpson. In 2016 he was writing his goodbyes on social media, contemplating ending his own life. Today, thanks to a Tiverton charity, he has a home, work, and purpose.

The 37-year old, who was born in Hong Kong, but grew up in Bude and worked in Tiverton in the early 2000s as a South West Youth Ministries support worker, left the Westcountry in 2005 for Maidstone where he married in 2008. Life was good for Chris, who went on to become a father of two soon after. However, it was then - in his own words - he pressed the self-destruct button.

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“It all started to fall apart when my undiagnosed mental health issues came to light. In the eight years of marriage, I ran away ten times. I was just overwhelmed with being a dad, and a husband and my way of dealing with it was to run away.

“Apparently I rate quite high on psychosis. There are things which I am imagining which isn't going on. It all came to a head one night when I was with my family, and I found myself standing at the bottom of our stairs with a rolling pin and a carving knife in my hands.

“I’ve now recognised that it was my self-loathing and hatred projecting outward. I didn’t know how to deal with the situation, so I got out any way I could. I made myself homeless quite a few times, but I always ended up going back to my wife as there was nowhere else for me to go.”

In 2015, Chris made himself homeless in London and began an incredibly fraught two-year journey. While Chris was living on the capital's busy streets, his wife and children remained in Maidstone. The house was rented from a nearby church, so Chris knew they were safe and not going to be evicted.

“I spent eight or nine months homeless in London. It wasn’t fun. I was sleeping rough a fair bit. I did manage to get into a night shelter where they allow you to stay for 30 nights if you’re trying to get into housing, jobs and stuff but I couldn’t stay.

“I was hanging around with heavy drug addicts and severe alcoholics, but thankfully I didn’t fall into that. The majority of the drug addicts and alcoholics are lovely people when they’re stable, but I’ve experienced some very weird situations.”

Chris ended up living rough on the streets of London

One character Chris recalls was a heroin addict.

“One time he said we should go and do some begging in the Mayfair area. I was sat outside this bank for a few hours and made about 25p. He came back from doing what he was doing, drank a bottle of sherry, and then said we should go over to the West End.

“He was asking everybody if they had any spare change as he had the gift of the gab and when he came across some guys on a night out, one of them gave us a £20 note. I thought that was breakfast for us sorted; my friend though had other ideas.”

Chris reluctantly agreed to go to a 24-hour slot machine casino where they lost all but 50p.

“We actually ended up walking out of the place with £320 between us, “he said.

“I bought a decent roll mat, a new bag and things like that. He on the other hand went and shot himself up four times in one hour. He wasn’t getting high; he was just keeping that steady dosage.

“He was injecting himself around his waist, and the bones in his legs were collapsing. He had huge abscesses on both of his calves, and I had to drag him to St Thomas’ Hospital as he could barely walk."

In a heartbreaking night, Chris saw his friend beg doctors to cut his own feet off.

“It just shows that addiction overrides the natural self-preservation instinct that we have. Fortunately, doctors didn't do as he asked, and I parted company with him.”

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Not long after Chris had left one troubled individual, another replaced him.

Chris said: “I ended up getting involved with a very very interesting Irishman who claimed to be ex-Ulster Defence Army. He told me he lost a leg after being shot 18 times, and still had scars on his other leg.

“He had post-traumatic stress issues and was still trapped in that psyche; scheming and always looking to pull the next con. That, mixed with his heavy vodka drinking and a crack addiction turned him into a very volatile person. He used to neck half a litre of vodka as if it was a glass of water.

“One minute he would be a father figure, the next he would be threatening to cut your throat. I was obviously dealing with my own mental issues that I did not understand at the time, and I was in a very vulnerable state.”

The Irish gentleman managed to persuade Chris to join him at his flat in Tottenham where he invited him to sleep on the floor rather than mixing with the “riff-raff” of the night shelter.

“I felt trapped and went along with that,” Chris said. “When I moved in with him, there was an issue with the hob, and we couldn’t get it to heat up properly. He contacted the landlord, who took his time to come around to sort it out. We were out waiting on the wall, and by this point, he had already had a litre of vodka.”

When the landlord eventually turned up, he was greeted with a barrage of abuse and foul language. As the landlord went to leave in his car, Chris’ Irish friend used his crutches to batter the windscreen.

“Minutes later a police van turns up with five officers," Chris said. "He even assaulted one of them. The last I saw of him he was being bundled off in the back of a police van.

“I was in hysterics and was bawling my eyes out; I didn’t know what to do. The police noticed I was in a very fragile state and asked if there was anyone they could contact for me. At that point, I was in communication with my wife, so they phoned her and I struggled to hold back the tears as I told her what had happened.”

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Despite being offered a room in a nearby hostel, his wife wanted to know he was safe and he accepted her invitation to return home.

“In hindsight, I should have gone back to the hostel,” Chris said. “Going to my wife was just a knee-jerk decision to be safe and get out of that world. I was back with her from August, and that lasted until November until it was all too much and I ran away again.”

Instead of returning to London, Chris headed to Bristol where he fell in with a slightly better crowd of homeless people who weren’t addicts or were in the process of becoming clean.

“Bristol was very different in terms of trying to get the support you needed. Cardiff had just shut their doors in trying to help their homeless get local connections so obviously everyone at the time was flocking to Bristol. The city was becoming overwhelmed.

“You would never starve in Bristol. There were loads of food drops or soup kitchens.”

CHAT launch Mid Devon Housing Hub

Chris explained that there were only 19 beds available at the city's homeless charity which was offered on a first come, first served basis. Queues for beds would start forming at lunchtime, and if you were lucky, you would be able to put your name on a list at 9:30 pm when it opened.

“Most nights it would end up in a fisticuffs situation between some of the guys, so it wasn’t great,” Chris said.

“I eventually got hold of a tent and pitched up in one of the parks which is slightly better, but if it’s raining, you can’t dry your clothes, or warm up when it’s cold. This was around Christmas 2015, and as a group, we wanted to bring some awareness to our situation. We wrote a load of cards saying “Merry Christmas, from the homeless guys that gave you this card”. It wasn’t to get anything; we had a mentality where we would tell people to give their change to the next guy and help somebody else.”

Chris left Bristol when one of the group started to become manipulative and pressured them to start a crowdfunding site.

“I knew things weren’t right, so I just got up, packed a small bag of stuff, and walked all the way to Bath via an old railway line. I had heard there was a shelter there, so I slept rough on the night I arrived and then managed to get in the following evening. They had a room not much bigger than a rug with a bed in it. That was it, but it was a lockable room with a lounge and TV and such. You could do what you wanted to do and not have to drag your possessions around.”

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Storm Gertrude and other severe winter weather had forced Bath Council to control numbers and only allow people to use the rooms if they had a connection with the city so Chris was asked to leave.

“I turned to Facebook and asked my friends if anyone wanted to take in a slightly unstable homeless person. My uncles who lived in Cheltenham and Gloucester said they would take me on but that I would have to do a bit of bed hopping between them. They said they would do what they could to find me a flat.

Chris managed to find a house share with a Polish lady and her ten-year-old son and set up home in a basement.

“I managed to get housing benefit which dealt with my financial needs, but my mental and emotional needs weren’t being addressed. That eventually became too much to deal with, and I ran away again upsetting everybody there.”

Chris left Gloucestershire and ended up back in Devon in Plymouth. Thanks to a social fund loan and benefits he was able to spend some nights in a Travelodge, but money soon ran out, and he could not stay.

“I hadn’t looked forward, and I didn’t have a sleeping bag or any clothes. There was one Friday night where I thought that was it. All I had left was a couple of quid to get a small pouch of baccy and thought that that was the end of Chris Simpson.

“I put a message on Facebook telling people not to try and save me; I didn’t want to be saved.”

Thankfully, an old friend who Chris used to play in a band with when he lived in Bude had a chat online with him and offered a place for the night.

“My friend was in communication with my brother Jeff who lives here in Tiverton, and he came up that weekend and took me into his house with his wife and two girls.”

It was in February 2016 that Chris first came into contact with CHAT who he saw the first thing on the following Monday.

“I told them what was what, and they told me of all the different benefit schemes I could use to help me. They said that if I did the groundwork in finding the landlord or the agent who was prepared to take me on, they would be able to do the paperwork and legal documents and fast track my application.”

Chris says that the help and support in Tiverton was far better to anything he could have imagined in London.

“In London in July 2014 all they said they could do was give us a train fare back to Maidstone where I wasn’t getting the right support or it was taking too long. After the incident where I was at the bottom of the stairs, two police officers suggested I check myself into a psychiatric hospital. I spent two weeks in an emergency overflow private psychiatric hospital until they told me I wasn’t mentally ill, but that I had psychological issues that needed to be addressed. That was in July, and I didn’t get a single call to ask how I was until October.

“In Tiverton, I went to the depression and anxiety centre which is right next door to CHAT and spoke with a lady there who told me I had effectively slipped through the net. I was referred to the next stage when I met up with a guy at Silverleigh who processed me and got me to a chief consultant psychiatric.

In May this year, Chris was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. He explained it was a mixture of post-traumatic stress disorder and bi-polar.

In June, thanks to CHAT, Chris was able to move into a new apartment close to the town centre and was referred to Roundabout in Exeter which provides affordable furniture for people who have been homeless.

“It’s been a long wait to get therapy sorted, and I have also got involved with the Vineyard Church. As well as CHAT my brother has supported me, and I am now learning not to be so self-destructive.

Chris at home in Tiverton with his paintings

“Without CHAT I would be in a situation of begging and borrowing from family to get a deposit, which would have caused a lot of stress. I now only have £20 left to pay back to CHAT on the £400 that I borrowed from them. They told me it was rare for somebody to be able to pay it back so quickly.”

Currently, Chris supports himself with £250 per fortnight Employment and Support Allowance but also does up to 16 hours a week working on a friend’s 16-acre garden and land.

“It’s helped a lot, and I’ve been able to pay off large chunks of the loan,” he added.

As well as working, Chris has taken up painting as a form of therapy, and some of his art is on display at CHAT’s new hub at Coggan’s Well House.

“I don’t see that art should be used as a form of income, and I’m not as skilled as many with a brush, but I feel that I want my art to help others feel positive. The two pieces I gave to CHAT were quite lively, lots of colour and energy and they will hopefully give new clients hope. CHAT has been amazing. They have such compassion, they don’t judge you at all, and they’re very friendly and deal with the complicated paperwork.

“For a lot of people, when you’re homeless, it is completely overwhelming. You go into survival mode; you focus on keeping yourself safe and physically well, so when it comes to filling in a ten-page benefit form, it can be a struggle. Without CHAT, it would have been impossible.

“Knowing that somebody was there to do it for me - for nothing - is amazing.”

Chris said there should be more organisations like CHAT helping people across the country. He added: “You’ll get different levels of help depending on where you go. There needs to be some consistency to stop people migrating to where it’s better which can inundate certain areas where they cannot take any more people. Places just end up falling apart. People would then choose to be where they want to, rather than going where the help is.”

Because of Chris’ former links to Tiverton, he now feels secure and settled. For Chris things are looking positive, with his passion for art, his church and even a new girlfriend.

If you want to find out more about the work CHAT do, you can visit them at their headquarters at Coggan's Well House, Phoenix Lane, Tiverton, EX16 6LU. You can also call on 01884 255606 or email theoffice@chatmid.co.uk